Traveling man Michael Weller’s journey to Moomtaj BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Approaching Moomtaj By Michael Weller. Directed by Rick Lombardo. Set by Janie E. Howland. Costumes by Frances Nelson McSherry. Lighting by Daniel Meeker. Music by Haddon Kime. Multimedia design by Dorian Des Lauriers. Violence design by Robert Walsh. Sound by Lombardo and Kime. With Robert Prescott, Rachel Harker, Kevin Topka, Natalie Brown, Lordan Napoli, Jacob Brandt, and Thomas Derrah. At New Repertory Theatre through October 17.

The protagonist of Michael Weller’s ambitious but jumbled Approaching Moomtaj takes a virtual leap through the looking glass to arrive, an angst-ridden Indiana Jones, in a fantastical cartoon kingdom somewhere between Arabia and Oz. Its citizenry, the Moomtajians, have one foot in the Afghanistan of Tony Kushner’s far superior Homebody/Kabul and the other in a belly-dance-driven wet dream with a nod to family values. Author of the 1972 Moonchildren and the screenplay for Ragtime, Weller has said that the germ of his play was a vivid dream he had, in the wake of September 11, of an Arabian locale whose effect on him bordered on blissful serenity. So he dreamed up this complicated His Dark Materials–type vision of travel between worlds, one the troubling milieu of Manhattan in the wake of terrorism, dot-com reversals, and midlife crisis, the other an Arabian Nights–perfumed setting for character-building adventure. The central problem with the work, apart from its self-indulgence and tangle, is that the Moomtaj evoked is no sand-strewn realm of tranquility on a shimmering lake, as in Weller’s dream, but the two-dimensional comic-book world of a computer game — the playing of which is how you get there.

Walker Dance is a Manhattan consultant on the brink of financial crisis and divorce in whose wounded psyche the aftershock of September 11 has overlaid that of an earlier crisis involving fire, smoke, and emotional loss. Further straining his marriage to attorney Kelly, with whom he has a young son, is the recent arrival in their lives and apartment of Walker’s West-Coast-biker-hippie-cab-driver half-brother Wylie (shades of True West), who has secreted under his bed a computer on which is installed his latest invention, the "interactive spiritual software" that takes you to inner healing via Moomtaj. There are still bugs to be worked out of it, though, and dangerous thugs are after the program. Between the bugs and the thugs, danger lurks for Walker — who inadvertently activates the machine’s "voice recognition for the psyche" — both in and out of Moomtaj, a pan-Eastern alternative reality peopled by parallel embodiments of his own lusts, fears, and paranoid imaginings. Everyone in the cast plays two parts, one on Planet Earth, one in the fortune-cookie realm of the play’s title — all of the goings-on in which are exotic mirrors of Walker’s real-life crisis.

The potentially confusing back-and-forth of this fable isn’t easy to pull off, and New Rep gives it a noble go, with an excellent if sometimes over-the-top cast (led by the American Repertory Theatre’s Thomas Derrah as Wylie) that under Rick Lombardo’s direction pushes the winking humor rather than the transformative power of Moomtaj. Unlike Adam Rapp’s Stone Cold Dead Serious, which sets up entry to a virtual world where the danger is real but doesn’t actually take us there, Approaching Moomtaj — its simple plexiglass set pieces augmented by two TV monitors and a large upstage screen — provides slide-collage suggestions of the worlds of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and a trailer-park conflagration of the past, along with shadowy computer-graphic renderings of the caves, deserts, and palaces of Moomtaj.

All of this is inventive and has the potential to delight. The flaws are two-fold. First is the tone taken toward Moomtaj, which comes across as a repository of silly sex comedy and burlesqued adventure rather than as someplace magical and possibly redemptive. The other is in the presentation of Walker. Folding his needy inner child into film and television actor Robert Prescott’s handsome, hulking form and whining to his gonzo bro’, his enigmatic shrink, or his gamine-cellist mistress about everything from his wife’s demands to the ugly truth September 11 taught him about himself, he’s just too self-indulgent for us to care about, his "healing" a confused combination of callousness and compromise complete with a clownish Gloucester-at-Dover leap into no-place-like-home at the end.

The actors, however, motor energetically through this wayward three-hour journey toward Nirvana. Rachel Harker contrasts the brittle Kelly with the giddily peremptory Queen of Moomtaj. And Lordan Napoli, though she bears down on the cuteness button, charms as goofball temptresses real and imagined. It bothered me that Kevin Topka, as the intimidatable Iranian-nomad warrior whom Walker takes to seeing in both worlds, is the only person of color in the cast, but the Musclemania New England champion has the body for the role. And the now menacing, now kibitzing Derrah as the multifaceted Wylie, who morphs into a wily Arab merchant hustling clanking wares, straddles not only the play’s two worlds but also the border between commedia zany and whirling dervish while holding on to his humanity.